UWEC Day 12

Start of the carnivores! - Lions

Bisa, one of the lionesses

Now that Hameed finally had a decent supply of drugs, we were able to start work on the large carnivores this week. He first wanted to start with the 3 lions: Kibonge (male), Bisa and Zara (lionesses). Today we worked on Bisa and that took quite a bit of time. Once Hameed darted her, she took a while to go down, but once she finally did go down, we all went in there and first got her on the scale to weigh her... Try lifting a 200kg lioness, not that easy. She needed of injections of antibiotic, dewormer,  and multivitamin. I tried to get a heart rate on her, but she was so big and overweight it was very difficult to hear anything. This was also my first time being so close and personal to an African Lion, and wow are they a lot bigger up close. Her paw was massive! So beautiful though. We were going to leave the other lions and leopard until tomorrow.

Massive paw! 

Dental check

Croc restraint take two:
Ok, so Pete wanted to try his muzzles once more with the UWEC crocs to see if they really can produce results. Other than it taking a while for Pete to get the crocs out of the pond, he was able to successfully slip on the muzzles without much force and they worked like a charm. They did not rip or slip. He put the muzzle on each croc in the exhibit with no problems. He was much happier about the success and felt like this could really go somewhere!

So relaxed

Work again on that old Ostrich:

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After lunch we had to go check out that ostrich again because she began limping. Once we got to the Kidepo exhibit, we found her sitting all by herself in a corner of the exhibit. Hameed wanted her restrained so that we could take a good look at her foot. Unfortunately this process what a little hectic and disorganized. There were too many people trying to help and put in their own opinion about what should be done. I think personally the experience overall was more stressful for the bird than not. We all took a feel of her foot and it felt quite hard. Hameed questioned whether it could have been an abscess rather than a tumour. So he took a scalpel blade and lanced one of the masses. A HUGE amount of pus began to ooze out. This made us lean more towards infection, however, tumours can present with pus and he was worried if we traumatized the wound too much that we could spread tumour cells to the rest of her body. Nonetheless, the other masses were lanced and opened to drain. The wounds were flushed and packed with a medicinal herb that was grown here at the zoo in the garden. We were going to reassess her in the morning if things weren't going as well as they should be for healing.

Health check on first Serval cat:

Cat is in the bag...

The last procedure of this long, but exciting day was working on one of the Serval cats in the vet hospital ward. These cats are not much bigger than say a Maine Coon cat, but just much more vicious... Barbara and one of the keepers went to just catch her in a net from her enclosure. I then gave her the injection to knock her down (through the net). We waited a bit until she became unresponsive. Then she was weighed and then we put her on the table. I was able to get blood first try from her (in general it is harder to get blood from cats, veins are so small). We gave her some antibiotics, dewormer and multivitamin. We then put her back in the net and I gave the reversal agent to wake her back up.

Hit the vein!

Day at the clinic finished!













Out for dinner at Annas Corner:
The German girls wanted to come visit the zoo today, and I was supposed to meet them and take them around. Clearly I had a really busy day, so once I was finished I met up with them at the chimp island exhibit. I proposed to them that I could probably get them a behind the scenes visit with the baby chimps. I just went to talk tot Helen, one of the keepers, and she was more than happy to let them come, especially since they were chimp researchers. After a fun visit, we decided to go out for dinner to Anna's Corner, up the road. Pete joined us as well. It's this nice little place run by an Italian lady. It was well known for its Pizza and coffee. I was very excited to have a real cup of coffee that I had not had in a long time. And the pizza that I ordered was delicious! We got into a really intense intellectual discussion about conservation issues that are realities in Africa and efforts people are making to mitigate them. Everyone had a really interesting point of view and it was great to share these ideas we all had with each other.